College and Research Libraries ume of requests increases, it would be very difficult to justify the use of facsimile with the machinery currently available.- Marion G. Hess, State University College, Potsdam, N.Y. A Report on the Consumer Survey of New Serial Titles. By A. Frederick Kuhl- man, made for the Joint Committee on the Union List of Serials, Inc., and the Library of Congress under a grant from the Council on Library Resources, Inc., August 1, 1967. 84p. New Serial Titles, in the words of one reference librarian, "is one of the most im- portant bibliographical aids ever devised." The purpose of NST is three-fold: ( 1) to list promptly information about serials which began publication after 1949, as an aid to acquisition; ( 2) to supply locations of these serials in libraries in the United States and Canada, to expedite interlibrary loan; and ( 3) to provide data for catalog- ing. The publication itself has been de- signed to supplement continuously the Union List of Serials and to eliminate the need for another edition of this massive work. After the publication of the third edition of the Union List, the Joint Committee on the Union List of Serials, Inc., initiated a study of New Serial Titles ( NST) to de- termine the degree of "consumer" satis- faction and to elicit suggestions for its im- provement. With financial support from the Council on Library Resources, A. Frederick Kuhlman, assisted by an advisory commit- tee, conducted a comprehensive study based largely on questionnaires and interviews with librarians who subscribe to and/ or contribute to NST. The Report of the study cites an extremely high level of approval of the performance of NST. The scope was considered to be satisfactory by 93.7 per cent of those re- sponding; 84.7 per cent felt that it is suffi- ciently representative of all fields of knowledge; 89.4 per cent indicated that the locations cited can meet interlibrary loan requests; 81.8 per cent reported that its record of bibliographical changes was adequate; and reactions to other aspects were also favorable. In spite of a general Recent Publications I 61 satisfaction, the participants in the Con- sumer Survey offered suggestions and im- plicit criticism from which Dr. Kuhlman has extracted a number of constructive proposals for the improvement of NST. Although consumer satisfaction with the scope of NST was almost unanimous, there was strong support for including more government publications. There is already wide coverage of this type of serial, but Dr. Kuhlman recommends that municipal publications should also be included. An increase in coverage for other types of government publications actually is a mat- ter of more comprehensive reporting by libraries in categories already included. This same principle should, he recom- mends, be applied to other types and sub- ject categories of serials for which report- ing is presently inadequate. To accomplish this, he suggests that the number of sub- scribing and contributing libraries should be selectively increased. The Special Li- braries Association, the American Theo- logical Library Association, and the vari- ous divisions of ALA should, he feels, take the initiative in any such attempt at in- creasing the number of libraries which conh·ibute to NST. Other suggestions in the Repo1·t include the prompt reporting of all changes in policies for lending serials ; the preparing of entries from the advance printer's copy of national bibliographies, resulting in faster bibliographical control of foreign serials; and the inclusion of LC classifica- tion and card numbers when available. Of particular interest to the user of NST are the recommendations that bibliographical changes should be included in the same alphabet with new titles , and that monthly issues should be cumulated. It is notable, however, that the expansion of the list to include pre-1950 titles is not recommend- ed. The Report is obviously of great value to all of those who are concerned with the policies governing NST. As Dr. Kuhlman remarks in his recommendations , NST should be considered to be "in its forma- tive years," and changes in its scope and organization are a natural condition of its growth and of the changing needs of li- 68 I College & Research Libraries· January 1969 braries. To date, Robert D. Desmond, its editor, and the Library of Congress have done an outstanding job of developing this tool. With the help of this survey they should be able to enhance the value of NST for the effective bibliographical con- trol of serials in the future.-]os eph H. Treyz, University of Michigan. Bookplates for Libraries; Contemporary Designs for School, Public, College, and University Libraries. By Edward H . Shickell, with an introduction by Wil- liam R. Holman. Austin, Texas: Roger Beacham , 1969. 69p. , illustrated. $12.95. The evolution of bookplates since the fif- teenth century, and particularly their col- lection , categorization, and admiration since the latter part of the nineteenth, oc- cupies a substantial literature, much of it privately printed. Add to this a smattering of earlier books on bookplate design, and this handsome new volume of original de- signs for libraries stands out as unusually fresh and attractive. It is to some degree complem entary to Mr. Holman's Library Publications, a 1965 Beacham publication distributed b y John Howell Books, and is, like this larger and earlier volume, published to stimulate more interesting and imaginative printing for libraries and their clientele. Mr. Shickell's seventy-two specimen plates make use of a number of the better t ype- faces and his own skillful calligraphy rendered in four colors suitable to library plates. Although their range of both color and form is limited by the fact that they are one man's work, he is both imaginative and eclectic, and his variety and taste can- not but be stimulating to librarians seek- ing to design bookplates. Mr. Holman's inb·oduction presents both encouragement and practical advice, in- cluding the suggestion that if all else fails to produce a work of art the reader may violate Mr. Shickell' s copyright a little b y lifting a design direct from the book. The type faces used are carefully identified, and an index leads you to the plates in which they appear.-David H eron, Uni- v ersity of Kansas. Evaluation of the MEDLARS Demand Search Service. By F. W. Lancaster, Bethesda: National Library of Medicine, 1968. 276p. (available from NLM Office of Public Information) . Of all the automated information retrieval systems which are currently in operation, the MEDLARS (Medical Literature Anal- ysis and Retrieval) System of the U.S. Na- tional Library of Medicine has perhaps most captured the world's imagination and attention and has put both the United States and medicine as a subject discipline in the forefront in the use of computers as an aid in solving problems in information transfer. MEDLARS is a machine system designed to serve several purposes includ- ing the monthly production and printing of Index Medicus, one of the world's pri- mary medical indexing media. It has as well the capability to produce and print subsets of a large file of literature citations either on a continuing basis for special subject groups or on demand for individ- · · uals. The system inherently must, there- fore, possess some of the trade-offs that are inevitable in any multi-purpose sys- tem. This study is not an evaluation or descrip- tion of the entire MEDLARS system; (such a description is being currently pub- lished by the National Libra1y of Medi- cine, under the title: Description and His- tory of MEDLARS) . It is rather an at- tempt to evaluate its " demand search module," a component designed to pro- duce, by computer, comprehensive bibli- ographies on many-faceted subjects on re- quest. Nevertheless, in the process of studying this report, a reader can learn much about the construction and use of the entire MEDLARS system. In fact, some of the problems and prerequisites ex- plored in the study have relevance to all kinds of literature searching, manual as well as machine. There do not seem to be any particularly new methodological approaches offered in this study. They are essentially modifica- tions and refinements of those developed by Cleverdon and others. Nevertheless , the misgivings expressed by Alan M. Rees